Abstract
Whom I call ‘epistemic reductionists’ in this article are critics of the notion of ‘moral luck’ that maintain that all supposed cases of moral luck are illusory; they are in fact cases of what I describe as a special form of epistemic luck, the only difference lying in what we get to know about someone, rather than in what (s)he deserves in terms of praise or blame. I argue that epistemic reductionists are mistaken. They implausibly separate judgements of character from judgements concerning acts, and they assume a conception of character that is untenable both from a common sense perspective and with a view to findings from social psychology. I use especially the example of Scobie, the protagonist of Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, to show that moral luck is real—that there are cases of moral luck that cannot be reduced to epistemic luck. The reality of moral luck, in this example at least, lies in its impact on character and personal and moral identity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The paradox of moral luck arises from our common notions of control and responsibility. We tend to believe that people are morally responsible only for things (actions, outcomes) that are or were under their control. Insofar as luck determined what happened, responsibility is diminished. At the same time, we cannot get around the fact that neither (all) the antecedents of any of our actions or situations in which we act, nor the antecedents of our own persons, were under our control. All this seems, from our perspective, a matter of luck. Yet we hold on to the idea of moral responsibility, and it seems wise to do so. On the paradox of moral luck, see, for instance, Dickenson (2003: 11-14, 46ff.)
Nussbaum (1995) might also be placed among the adherents to the third position, even if she is not concerned with moral luck in a narrow sense.
I should note that it does not have to be one’s character that becomes transparent to others; it may also be the case that people simply find out what one has done.
Cf. Concepcion (2002: 458): “Advocates of the epistemic argument for immunity from luck improperly over-generalize its limited conclusion.”
Epistemic luck in the normal sense is defined by Pritchard (2004: 193) as ‘the putative situation in which an agent gains knowledge even though that knowledge has come about in a way that has (…) involved luck in some significant measure’. The epistemic luck I talk about in this article differs from this, in that it does not concern what the (un)lucky person knows, but what others come to know about him.
This ‘definition’ is of course not water-tight, though it will do for the present purpose. What should we say, for instance, when someone else placed the banknote there for me to find it – someone who knew I would walk there at that time of day? Such cases are perhaps better covered by Duncan Pritchard’s more technical definition of luck, which invokes the idea of possible worlds. See Pritchard (2005), 125ff.
‘Constitutive luck’ is one of four kinds of moral luck first distinguished by Nagel (1983: 28) and later systematized (and named and renamed) by others; it is luck that influences the talents, capacities, and inclinations one has. ‘Circumstantial luck’ (or ‘situational luck’) points to the role of circumstances, the situation one is in – for instance, one may be exposed to temptations others will never have to face. ‘Causal luck’ is ‘luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances’; ‘resultant luck’ (or ‘consequential luck’, ‘outcome luck’), finally, is luck in ‘the way one’s actions and projects turn out’. Card (1996: 2) and Athanassoulis (2005: 24) have rightly observed that constitutive luck has been virtually ignored in the literature. Most attention by far has gone to situational and resultant luck. (Cf. Walker [(1993): 247-248] and Dickenson [(2003): 4].) This might be due to an intuition that the notion of constitutive luck threatens to undermine everything – to do with morality, that is. I believe such an intuition would be incorrect, but I need not go into this here.
And thus, for Richards, luck may influence how we ought to treat someone, “not by changing what he deserves, but by changing the grounds on which we are obliged to judge” (1993: 170).
See footnote 8.
I use the terms ‘character’ and ‘character traits’ without taking an essentialist position on their meaning. In fact, I am more inclined towards the view that there is no such thing in people as a stable character, constant throughout all changes in the circumstances. A contextual view of character seems to me to be much more plausible, which entails diminished plausibility of the epistemic reductionist view that luck’s only influence may be that of revealing the character that the actor already had. For a critique of the notions of character and character traits see, for instance, Harman (2000) and Harman (2001), Merritt (2000), and Ross and Nisbet (1991).
The question then becomes what the noncollaborator is to blame for. Zimmerman answers this by distinguishing between ‘P is to blame for more events than P*’ and ‘P is more to blame than P*’ (1993: 227); the degree to which one is to blame depends on one’s character, not on the number of events for which one is to blame.
Zipursky (2008) distinguishes between two dimensions of responsibility or blameworthiness: ‘fault-expressing responsibility’, capturing the degree to which an action is expressive of the actor’s character, and ‘agency-linking responsibility’, ‘expressing the notion that the degree to which a person is responsible for some event is dependent upon whether that event is a doing, or an action, of that person’ (2008: 99) – in short, agency-linking responsibility is about the extent to which something is some person’s act rather than a mere event, and fault-expressing responsibility is about the extent to which an act is characteristic or typical for the actor. Now, in Zipursky’s terms, epistemic reductionists see only the fault-expressing dimension, while forgetting the agency-linking dimension of responsibility, which (according to Zipursky) can justify different responses depending on the outcome of acts that are the same in terms of fault-expressing responsibility. Whereas Zipursky’s convincing defense of moral luck depends on there being an agency-linking aspect to responsibility, my defense will focus on luck’s impact on character and identity – not least because of epistemic reductionists’ focus on character. Zipursky (2008: 119) suggests that “[t]he most charitable version of the moral luck critic (…) depicts him as agreeing that external performances are the objects of evaluation, but opposing the claim that whether that performance ripens into harm for reasons unrelated to the performance itself should have an impact on our judgment of the performer.” I believe, however, that this charitable interpretation does not apply to the epistemic reductionists discussed in this article, because they see character as the object of evaluation.
Enoch and Marmor (2007: 431) mention another consequence: “A character-based theory of blame and responsibility straightforwardly entails that there is neither consequential nor circumstantial moral luck (…). But character-based theorists have a price to pay for this elegant result when it comes to constitutive luck. For it follows from their view (…) that you are responsible for your morally relevant character traits just in case they reflect badly on your morally relevant character traits, which they trivially always do. On this view (…) you are responsible for all your morally relevant character traits, regardless of whether they are or ever have been in any interesting way under your control.”
An anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out that there is a difference between dramatic circumstances that may radically change or even break down a person’s identity, and the ordinary circumstances that continuously support and (subtly) change one’s identity. Although this lies beyond the confines of the present article, it would be interesting to investigate the relevance of this difference to the problem of moral luck. When do we consider the role of circumstances important enough to speak of circumstantial (or situational) moral luck? Arguably, we are always the subjects of situational (good or bad) luck, but this simply becomes clearest when the circumstances are more dramatic, and therefore we are more prone in such cases to speak of situational luck (whereas here the difference may be merely epistemic!).
So (respect for) autonomy and informed consent are not at issue here. The surgeon has to decide – we can assume that both treatments require instantaneous action, so that there is also no time to consult relatives of the patient.
She would certainly experience what Williams (1981) called ‘agent regret’, a form of regret characteristic of someone whose actions somehow contributed to the coming about of something bad or undesirable. Though agent regret is ‘by no means restricted to voluntary agency’ (1981: 27-28), it cannot be separated from remorse and moral (self-)evaluation.
References
Athanassoulis N (2005) Morality, moral luck and responsibility: Fortune’s web. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke
Baumeister RF, Vohs KD (eds) (2007) Encyclopedia of social psychology, Vol. 2. Sage Publications, Los Angeles
Card C (1996) The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Temple University Press, Philadelphia
Concepcion DW (2002) Moral luck, control, and the bases of desert. J Value Inq 36:455–461
Coyne MU (1985) Moral luck? J Value Inq 19:319–325
Dickenson D (2003) Risk and luck in medical ethics. Polity Press, Cambridge
Enoch D, Marmor A (2007) The case against moral luck. Law Philos 26:405–436
Franzoi SL (2006) Social psychology. McGraw-Hill, New York
Greene G (1971) The heart of the matter. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth [1948]
Harman G (2000) The nonexistence of character traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 223–226
Harman G (2001) Virtue ethics without character traits. In: Byrne A, Stalnaker R, Wedgwood R (eds) Essays on ethics and metaphysics for Judith Jarvis Thomson. MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), pp 117–127
Merritt M (2000) Virtue ethics and situationist personality psychology. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 3(4):365–383
Nagel T (1983) [1976] “Moral Luck”, In: Nagel T. (ed) Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983 (first edition 1979), 24–38
Nussbaum M (1995) The fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [1986]
Pritchard D (2004) Epistemic luck. J Philos Res 29:193–222
Pritchard D (2005) Epistemic luck. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005
Pritchard D (2006) Moral and epistemic luck. Metaphilosophy 37(1):1–25 January 2006
Rescher N (1993) “Moral Luck”, in Statman (ed.) (1993), 141–166
Richards N (1993) [1986] “Luck and Desert”, in Statman (ed.) (1993), 167–180
Ross L, Nisbet RE (1991) The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. Temple University Press, Philadelphia
Schinkel A (2008) “Moreel Toeval”. In: Musschenga A, Siertsema B (eds) De Utopie van de Maakbaarheid, Ten Have, Kampen, 136–157
Statman D (1993) “Introduction”, in Statman (ed.) (1993), 1–34
Statman D (1993) Moral luck. State University of New York Press, New York (red.)
Walker (Coyne) MU (1993) [1991] “Moral luck and the virtues of impure agency”, in Statman (ed.) (1993), 235–250
Williams B (1981) [1976] “Moral Luck”, in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, 20–39
Zimmerman MJ (1993) [1987] “Luck and moral responsibility”, in Statman (ed.) (1993), 217–233
Zipursky BC (2008) Two dimensions of responsibility in crime, tort, and moral luck. Theor Inq in Law 9(1):97–137 January 2008
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a Dutch article Schinkel (2008); I thank Bert Musschenga, Jan Boersema, and other members of the Blaise Pascal Institute, as well as Kees Schinkel for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this Dutch article. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers for ETMP, whose comments were very helpful in revising the first version of the present article, and to an anonymous reviewer for the (2008 conference of the) British Society for Ethical Theory, who also provided constructive criticism on an earlier version of the present article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schinkel, A. The Problem of Moral Luck: An Argument Against its Epistemic Reduction. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 267–277 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9153-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9153-y